Ishmael Overview

Have I mentioned how important I think Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael is? I reread it recently for the first time in a while, and was again impressed with how many important modernity-challenging ideas are packed into one novel.

I would dearly love everyone to read it. It’s not that I hold it to be flawless—to be treated as a divinely-inspired religious text. But it’s hard to think of a more powerful place to start for seeding incredibly important conversations and shifting awareness. It often transforms its readers, whether teenagers or retirees.

Options for reading the book include library access (also an audio version recently out), purchase (I recommend bookshop.org, which goes to an independent book shop of your choice), or a few sites (1, 2, 3) that somehow make the text available. Being trapped behind a commercial “paywall” seems counter to the entire message of the book, which explicitly encourages sharing the message broadly.

I also suggest that you visit the site ishmael.org for more related content and FAQ answers from Daniel Quinn (who died in 2018). A recent podcast series called Human Nature Odyssey, by Alex Leff, does a fantastic job of presenting key ideas from the book.

As a poor substitute for the entire book, what I’ll do is create a series here on Do the Math that offers a relatively comprehensive version of the themes in the book. It won’t be as masterfully crafted as the actual book—but perhaps will be good enough to generate similar patterns of thought, and inspire greater readership of the original work.

Structure

As I recently read the book again, I took notes that I deliberately kept to “one line” per numbered chapter subsection (for all but two sections that contained too many important ideas for one line). This “preview” post is built off of said notes, expanded beyond the initial one-liners to be full sentences. As such, it acts as a sort of expanded table of contents. The posts that follow this one will be broken into the thirteen chapters, released at an intended cadence of two per week.

It may be a mistake to put this preview (spoiler) up front, before the individual chapter posts, but that’s just how it’s going to be. It may work best if you have already read Ishmael and would like a lightning-fast reminder (also might serve as a decent reference for finding and re-reading sections of particular interest). You may wish to wait for the start of the full content in a couple days. For that matter, perhaps reading the original book is the best first step, using this resource as a compact review in years to come.

Some quick notes:

• Page numbers in the chapter headings below refer to the original and 25th anniversary editions, separated by a slash.
• Each chapter is organized into numbered subsections, reflected in the numbered lists below.
• I frequently use the term “modernity” as an easy label, but this word is not prominent (or even present?) in the book—which tends to use “Mother Culture” to represent the prevailing worldview.
• Being over 30 years old, the book still uses the convention of “man,” which I tend to replace with “human” in my review.
• Rare personal opinions/contributions are placed in [square brackets].
• As individual chapters are featured in future posts, I will link them in the outline below for convenient access.

ONE (1/1)

Chapter One introduces the protagonist/narrator and the telepathic gorilla named Ishmael who is to be Alan’s teacher. While the narrator’s name is never revealed in this book, we learn it to be Alan Lomax in future works. For the purposes of this review, it is far easier to refer to him by name.

1. Alan sees an ad in the paper by a teacher seeking students with an honest desire to save the world. The ad makes Alan angry, calling to mind youthful, naive fantasies about a better world.
2. Alan’s curiosity drives him to learn what huckster/scheme is behind the ad, startled to find a large gorilla (who we later learn is named Ishmael) behind a glass wall in the otherwise empty Room 105 in a shabby downtown building. He quickly discovers Ishmael’s telepathic communication capacity and uneasily settles in for Ishmael’s story.
3. Ishmael recounts his earliest memories in a zoo, having been captured in the wild as an infant. He and other animals constantly asked: “Why, why, why” is life this way—there’s clearly something very wrong about it. He was transferred to a traveling menagerie, billed as the monster named Goliath. He slowly picked up language by close attention to the steady stream of visitors and children—starting with his oft-repeated name. A mysterious man turned up and pronounced him “not Goliath!”
4. Ishmael was “thunderstruck” by being stripped of a name: now nobody! A few days later, he awakens in a secured gazebo on an estate lawn. The mysterious man appears again, this time pronouncing him to be Ishmael, to his great relief. The man is Walter Sokolow, who quickly learns of Ishmael’s comprehension of language. Excruciating failures at vocalization lead to a frustrated telepathic outburst/connection. Once Ishmael gets up to speed, the two begin researching together as colleagues. Sokolow marries a woman wholly displeased by Ishmael, and gives birth to a girl, Rachel.
5. Rachel grows up tightly bonded to Ishmael. Sokolow dies, leaving Rachel as Ishmael’s protector. Ishmael eventually finds his calling as a teacher.
6. Ishmael mentions four past pupils, labeling all as failed outcomes. He then reveals the subject in which he has particular insight as being captivity. This is relevant because modernity traps us in a destructive system. So immersive is this trap that we can’t find or even sense the bars of the cage.
7. In explaining how he found his way to Ishmael, Alan recounts a school paper on a counterfactual Nazi future—many generations down the line when Aryans (alone) lived in all corners of the globe and the ugly history of how it had come about thoroughly expunged from cultural memory. One of the two characters in his story, Kurt, expresses an intangible feeling of having been lied to about something big, but could not identify just what. Alan feels similarly about our world, but doesn’t see what difference it could make to know the lie. Ishmael points out that if we could all sense the lie, we’d change [what I call “falling out of love with modernity“].
8. The next morning, upon reflection, the entire encounter with a telepathic gorilla seemed like it may have been nothing more than a dream.

TWO (31/33)

The lessons begin. Note that the term “gods” is used in a figurative sense.

1. Ishmael points out that the Germans of the 1930s were captives of a story. The cultural tide was too powerful to resist, even if you had problems with it. We, also, are captives of a story.
2. Skeptical Germans had the option to flee Germany for similar cultures that were less crazed. But modernity affords no such escape. Ishmael warns Alan that acquiring this perspective/knowledge is isolating [like taking the red pill].
3. Vocabulary: Takers and Leavers replace the more loaded terms “civilized” and “primitive.”
4. The aim is to discover our culture’s common story of how things came to be the way they are. The process will build a mosaic. The exact route/order is of secondary importance to the completed mosaic [turn off the left-brain and let the right brain absorb a holistic picture, over time].
5. More vocabulary: “A story is a scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods”; “To enact a story is to live so as to make the story a reality”; “A culture is people enacting a story.” Leavers and Takers are enacting completely different stories, the latter one leading toward catastrophe.
6. It is not accurate to say that Leavers represent Chapter 1 of a story and Takers Chapter 2 of the same story. These are different, parallel stories overlapping each other in time on the same planet.
7. Ishmael’s assignment to Alan: find modernity’s story—the one that “Mother Culture” incessantly whispers in our ears. What is the mythology shared by our culture? Alan is incredulous—rejecting the notion that we are primitive enough to subscribe to a mythology of any sort. The idea is laughably ridiculous.

THREE (47/51)

Ishmael extracts the story’s beginning out of Alan, as if pulling reluctant teeth.

1. Ishmael provides a tape recorder to capture Alan’s story. To make the task more tractable, Ishmael recommends starting just with the story’s beginning (saving the middle and end for later). Alan swears there will be no mythology in it.
2. Alan recounts the standard (approximate; broad-brush) tale of cosmology, geology, and evolution, ending up at humans. Ishmael asks Alan to identify the mythological aspect, but Alan simply can’t spot anything mythological about it: purely factual and science-based.
3. Ishmael offers a parable: a similar account from a jellyfish 500 Myr ago. The jellyfish account ends with the triumphant arrival of jellyfish on Earth.
4. Alan offers heavy and sustained resistance in accepting the mythological nature of his story’s culminating in the arrival of humans, but admits it in the end, through bared teeth.
5. Our standard story, though baked with factual ingredients, spins Earth as being made (by the “gods”) just for humans, and this unspoken assumption is of great importance in our culture.
6. Our story’s premise: the world was made for us, and therefore belongs to us. We can do with it whatever we wish. We speak of our planet, our environment, and even our wildlife. That’s mythology.
7. So, if the planet belongs to humans, why are things messed up? Alan suggests it’s because the gods made a mistake in designing Earth for humans (rather than, say, for jellyfish).
8. Alan’s assignment: come up with the middle part of the story. Alan predicts it will mimic the style of a Nova show.

FOUR (65/69)

The middle of the story comes out. Keep in mind, these are not Ishmael’s teachings, but an account of the story we tell ourselves in the culture of modernity.

1. Humans wasted millions of years living like animals. But that’s not how humans were meant to be. Humans could only realize their greatness if they formed settlements and got to work building civilization. To do this, they first needed to grow food: no more living at the whims of what the gods provide.
2. Our destiny was not to live like the lion or the wombat. Ishmael presses: what is human destiny—in the mythological sense?
3. Alan’s story goes that without man, the world was a dangerous, chaotic place: a wild, untamed jungle. It needed a ruler to set things straight. By this time, Alan is much quicker to recognize a mythology when he hears one coming out of his mouth: it is in no way a fact that Earth required a ruling species.
4. The trouble is: the world did not meekly succumb to human ambitions to rule. Nature resisted our attempts at control, constantly thwarting our efforts and schemes in every possible way. Therefore, the ruler must conquer the wild. This attitude is pervasive in our society: we hear it daily, in myriad, inexplicit undertones.
5. The damages accrued are just the price of fulfilling our unquestioned destiny. There’s no real choice: enacting a story where humans are at war with the world (as if an enemy) is going to be damaging.

FIVE (77/81)

Alan finishes out the end of the story—via substantial prompting, as usual.

1. What does the future hold? Well, admittedly, it’s going sideways. We’re at great risk of failure/collapse. Thus, we need to re-double our efforts and achieve perfect mastery of the planet to realize the paradise that Earth was meant to be in our competent hands.
2. Ishmael notes that the sense of peril is relatively new: mere decades ago the prevailing assumption was that “things were just going to go on getting better and better and better.” So, sure, humans were destined to rule this eventual paradise, but there’s a fly in the ointment: humans are intrinsically flawed, and thus always screw up the grand plans.
3. This perspective that humans are intrinsically flawed is part of our cultural history spanning millennia, but is largely limited to Taker mythology (i.e., the premise of modernity). Humans need not be that way.
4. Takers have a habit of relying on prophets to tell us how to live. Ishmael points out that these notions come from “the insides of your heads” [meat-brains]. Takers are convinced that it is impossible to find guidance from the “external” universe relevant as to how humans should live.
5. Ishmael draws a connection between the Taker-assumed fundamental flaw in humans and the observation that Takers don’t know how to live. Maybe, in fact, that is the flaw.
6. It amounts to a sad, desperate story: humans are fundamentally flawed, will never know the one right way to live, and are thus doomed to screw up. Yuck. Is there another story to be in?
7. Ishmael notes that he has been exposing connections hidden in plain sight—like tourist attractions that locals don’t even notice anymore. The next step is to find information on how humans ought to live, which Alan insists is not available.

SIX (93/97)

In search of the Law of Life…

1. We don’t need prophets [and their meat-brains] to tell us how to live: we can consult what’s actually there. An analogy is constructed to the role of aerodynamic laws in understanding how one might fly: discoverable by observing interactions of air and objects. Alan is still certain that one cannot discover (non-existent) laws on how to live.
2. Ishmael points out that humans are not exempt from the law of gravity. Where ought one look to find the Law of Life? Try the community of life! An aspiring aeronaut who wants to stay aloft would benefit from acquaintance with the laws of gravity and aerodynamics, thus: “when you’re on the brink of extinction and want to live for a while longer, the laws governing life might conceivably become relevant.”
3. Just as gravity keeps the Earth, solar system, and galaxy together/organized, so too does the Law of Life keep the community of life together. Yes, biologists know all about the relevant phenomena, but culture prevents scientists—like everyone else—from identifying a universal law, since the conviction is that any such law would not apply to humans, and thus not be a law.
4. The Law of Life will indeed apply to humans. Yet, our culture insists that humans are exempt; unique; transcendent; apart from nature.
5. The gods have played three dirty tricks on the Takers that are tough pills to swallow: 1) the Copernican Revolution revoked Earth’s status as the center of the cosmos (begrudgingly accepted not that long ago); 2) Darwinian evolution indicated that we emerged from the ignominious slime rather than being delivered by divine means (still new, barely accepted); and 3) humans are not exempt from the Law of Life (not yet accepted or even discussed). The only way to live long-term is to comply with the Law; else we go extinct.
6. Ishmael offers a story of a flying contraption that is not built on principles of sustainable aerodynamic flight. Ignorance of the law offers no protection from it. Just as the plummeting pilot sees wrecks of other failed attempts below, we see ruins of fallen civilizations that failed to comply with the Law of Life. We now see the ground rushing toward us. Our cultural “flying” contraption—called the Taker Thunderbolt—is a death trap.

SEVEN (111/117)

The Law of Life continues to elude Alan.

1. Ishmael tells of a culture of C people who eat B people, who eat A people, who eat C people. No one ever violates the law, but how would you discover the law in operation without observing violations? Where would you look?
2. Nature is not at war. The Law of Life is a peace-keeping law. Humans lived by this law for millions of years. The Takers’ violation is a recent phenomenon, demonstrably not a fundamental human flaw baked into our DNA.
3. Ishmael to Alan: Go away and come back when you can tell me the Law that has been at work from the very beginning in the community of life.
4. Alan felt depressed, rejected, and realized his time with Ishmael would someday come to an end. He wanted a teacher for life.

EIGHT (123/129)

Alan works out the Law of Life. Finally. But could I have done it?

1. Takers eliminate their competitors, their competitors’ food, the competitors to the food of their prey, etc. If all life behaved this way, few species would survive the all-out War on Life.
2. The Law may be stated: “You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.” Diversity is a core strength of the community of life. It’s an essential emergent feature, providing resilience as conditions inevitably change. Takers are essentially at war with the world and with biodiversity.
3. If hyenas—just to pick another species—were to eliminate their predators, their competition, their competitor’s food, and the competition of their prey’s food, the community of life would be thrown far out of balance and biodiversity would plummet. When Takers do the same (eliminating bears and wolves, erecting fences, applying pesticides and herbicides), it’s deemed “holy work.”
4. Increased food production/availability leads to a population explosion, but we tell ourselves that humans are exempt from such math, despite a towering mountain of evidence to the contrary.
5. Agriculture and settlement are not necessarily in violation of the law of life (limits to competition), but certainly are subject to it, ultimately.
6. Food begets babies. Famine becomes a chronic condition by always increasing the number of mouths to feed. We say we won’t “let” people starve, but the word “let” betrays our perceived role as gods—deciding who lives or dies.
7. Tribal maps of the pre-European Americas show a patchwork of different cultures. It’s both evidence and a mechanism for self limiting, because it wasn’t an option to expand beyond the land to which you belonged. It was also not possible for a Hopi to become a Navajo the way it is for a New Yorker to become a Texan.
8. Just as for a contraption not built with respect to aerodynamic laws, a way of life not built to obey the Law of Life will fail to remain “in flight.” Modernity—being such a violating construct; an enactment of the Taker premise—will die. Whether or not we accept this fact is irrelevant: it is guaranteed. Similarly, a person stepping off a cliff need not accept the role of gravity to experience its indifferent, fatal pull.
9. The world was not made for any one species. Life was fine before Taker culture emerged. It wasn’t a world of chaos desperate to be tamed by humans.
10. “The people of your culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. This mythology of human superiority justifies their doing whatever they please with the world…” Human supremacy, baby. Ishmael addresses misconceptions of the Noble Savage. Leaver culture tends to work well for people, lacking common afflictions of modernity such as crime, mental illness, drug addiction, etc.

NINE (149/159)

This marathon chapter presents an intriguing take on the biblical story in Genesis: the story of Adam and Eve, and their sons Cain and Abel. After the seventeen sections is an addendum Quinn suggested in the Foreword of the 25th anniversary edition. [It’s one of two places where a sub-chapter got more than one line in my notes.]

1. Takers branched off from the (continuing) Leaver story at the Agricultural Revolution. When did the revolution end? It never did; only spreading. It’s a defining feature of our culture. We perceive ourselves as revolutionaries against the natural order.
2. Takers unwittingly adopted a Leaver story about Taker origins, in which Takers were the bad guys—cursed by the gods.
3. Takers imagine they possess special knowledge to rule the world—a knowledge wholly absent in dumb Leavers (who, Takers would say, live like animals).
4. Ishmael tells a story of gods debating the thorny question of who should be favored in a fox/quail encounter. What is good for one is evil for the other—true of virtually every decision the gods make. In this story, a magical tree has fruit that bestows upon the gods the wisdom of who shall live and who shall die. Possessing this wisdom, gods can see that a creature’s luck may be good one day and bad the next: parceled fairly.
5. Fascinating! [Really, this is a tiny section.]
6. The gods discuss this curious creature named Adam. What if he—wrongly—gets it in his head that this fruit would also make him as wise as the gods, possessing the Knowledge of Good and Evil? He might develop a maniacal hubris, and begin to see all limits on man as evil, deciding who lives and dies as if a god, and always ruling in his own favor. Some don’t believe this kindly creature would become so monstrous, but—erring on the side of safety—sternly forbid his eating of the fruit upon punishment of death [an empty threat, in the end].
7. This story is eternally confusing to Takers. After all, isn’t knowledge highly prized in our culture, and absolutely necessary if we are to successfully fulfill our destiny to rule the world that belongs to us? [In fact, lacking Knowledge of Good and Evil constitutes “insanity” in courts.] Why would the story portray such knowledge as being dangerous? Well, perhaps it’s an early recognition that by thinking ourselves as wise as the gods, we might fast-track a sixth mass extinction in a few short millennia. Nothing like this happened before Takers became self-styled gods.
8. If Takers had written the origin story, it would not describe eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as The Fall. The event would have been praised as a crowning moment marking the beginning of a great Ascent. Unlike Leavers, Takers became righteous proselytizers, insisting everyone should live the way they do: the right way. Various Leaver cultures that tinkered with agriculture walked away from it, but doing so would be dreadfully difficult for Takers because it would amount to admission of colossal defeat.
9. Ishmael shares a map of Eurasia soon after agriculture took hold around the Fertile Crescent. The main lesson is that the pre-agricultural world beyond this region was not devoid of humans. Of particular interest, Semite pastoralists had front-row seats to the expansion of these new Takers. Now read the story of Cain and Abel in this context.
10. The story of Cain and Abel screams out as a story told by pastoralists (Abel; Semites) about an evil agricultural people (Cain; Takers)—cursed by the gods (or god)—hell-bent on domination. This interpretation clarifies the “Fall” story as a piece of “war propaganda” told by the Semites. Alan speculates some about the original Takers being identified as Caucasians, now synonymous with “whiteness,” but Ishmael shows little interest and does not run with this.
11. The Genesis stories survived because Semites were long holdouts, so the tales had time to take root. By the time the Hebrews descended from Semites, they had become Takers, and kept the inherited story without necessarily understanding its anti-Taker origin and message.
12. To Leavers, Takers act as if gods: doling out life and death as they see fit. In their telling, this angered their actual god, who banished them from their original paradise, casting them out to break the land by the sweat of their brows.
13. The Leavers saw toilsome agriculture as a curse, and sought some rationale: what terrible deed could have resulted in such punishment—to be deprived of Earth’s bounty that we enjoy without the intense labor?
14. In Hebrew, the name Adam means “man,” and might be associated with the human race. Cain and Abel represent the Taker/Leaver split.
15. Likewise, the name Eve means “life.” The expansion-oriented Takers needed babies, and women were the key to bringing more life into the world (yes; it takes both, but a clan of 80 women and 20 men can grow much faster than one with 20 women and 80 men). The fact that Eve was cast as the temptress relates to greater life-potential enabling more land to be subdued.
16. Granted, agriculture developed independently in other parts of the world, but the Semites were cut off by geography so at the time of the story’s emergence, they only knew of themselves and these hostile expansionists to their north.
17. The original meaning of the story is usually lost on Takers. Their clumsy attempt to explain it usually ascribes to the forbidden fruit the role of a somewhat arbitrary test of obedience—dismissing the (empty) perils of believing themselves to be as wise as gods. The part about acquiring wisdom is not an emphasized feature of the story. Also, note that Takers easily identify Adam as one of their own: not innocent/ignorant like those Leavers, but as a flawed agriculturalist like themselves.

New Proposed Addition

In the 25th Anniversary printing of Ishmael, Daniel Quinn responds in the Foreword to the question: “What would you do differently if you were writing Ishmael today?” He offers a new dialog between Alan and Ishmael that he suggests would go at the end of Chapter 9. Here is a recap of this addition.

A graph of human population shows a spectacular explosion that we hardly think remarkable. If a graph of the global population of badgers showed a similar trend, you’d find it alarming. The result of this explosion is the initiation of a sixth mass extinction [the original version of the book predates a growing awareness of the phenomenon bearing this name]. All this from a toxic habit of thought! Quinn takes another pass at the “food equals births” formulation, and mentions Malthus as an early influential thinker along these lines. The inevitable downslope of population will be tough, and it isn’t clear if we’ll handle it gracefully or disgracefully. It’s a chance to earn the moniker Homo sapiens: will we be wise about it? Clearly, many in our culture will have a tendency to portray any program of decline/retreat in hyperbolic terms laced with every sort of atrocity.

TEN (185/199)

The book becomes more of a novel for a bit, before lessons resume in a new setting.

1. Alan’s life suffers a number of unexpected, annoying, and painful interruptions. By the time he returns to Room 105 to resume lessons with Ishmael, the place is cleared out. The janitor indicates the previous tenant has been evicted, but is generally unhelpful.
2. The receptionist for the building management is an accomplished stonewaller, and masterfully fails to help Alan track down the former tenant. She is indignant at the absurd suggestion that a gorilla occupied the room.
3. Alan tracks down the Sokolow home to learn more about Ishmael’s disappearance. The butler, Partridge is top-shelf cagey, but does reveal that Rachel—Ishmael’s protector—died a few months back. Otherwise, he offers Alan no help.
4. Alan places an ad in the paper trying to make contact with other friends of Ishmael, which bears no fruit. He finally tracked down a traveling carnival, finding within one of its cages a very grumpy Ishmael, who told him to go away—after refusing Alan’s patronizing offer to rescue him.
5. Alan returns later that night, and Ishmael resigns himself to continuing Alan’s lessons—first establishing where they left off.
6. They work to define culture as the accumulation of information, techniques, beliefs, stories, assumptions, theories, customs, legends, etc. passed down to younger generations (which happens among many species). Human culture was present from Homo habilis all the way up through our species as an uninterrupted, evolving, successful set of accumulated learning. Leavers treasure this heritage and deliberately strive to maintain ancient wisdom. Takers flee the past, considering old tales to be obsolete dreck.
7. Takers preserve techniques for the production of things. Leavers preserve customs that work well for their people. The focus of Takers is on what’s good for things vs. people.
8. Leaver ways have been tested and refined over deep time. Leavers don’t need prophets to reveal the one right way to live. In fact, there is no one right way: Leaver cultures are tailored for specific localities: proven to work in that place. Every time Takers stamp out a Leaver people, they extinguish an ancient flame of immense value. It’s ugly.
9. Ishmael to Alan: I’m cold and tired: off with you!

ELEVEN (209/225)

Alan continues to annoy Ishmael with his neediness, pressing Ishmael for the story that Leavers live by. But at least he brings a few blankets. The fourth section/bullet is so loaded with great material that I allowed four lines instead of one in my “one-line” notes.

1. A grouchy Ishmael can find no compelling incentive to teach Alan the Leaver story, and Alan keeps offering insufficient motivation. It’s on the edge of being finished until Alan says that Takers can’t abandon their story without having another story to be in.
2. Ishmael asks: How did humans become human? What story were they enacting?
3. They establish the Taker bias: pre-agricultural life was devoid of meaning—it was stupid, ugly, detestable, and miserable. Ishmael raises the question: what was the agricultural revolution a revolution against?
4. Alan suggests that we needed to “get somewhere,” to have comforts and conveniences, and that even the destitute believe the post-revolution world is a big improvement over a “miserable” existence that “leads nowhere”—as Takers assert was practiced by the Leavers. This is where Alan shares a vivid and powerful impression [also described here] of a pre-revolution man in twilight living on a knife edge of survival, locked in a struggle between hunger (chasing elusive prey) and ravenous teeth (pursued by predators). Ishmael calls this utter nonsense! Like all animals evolved into this world, humans were well-adapted to life—generally having loads of leisure time. At this point, Ishmael role-plays a hunter-gatherer Leaver, challenged by Alan (as a Taker), whom Ishmael calls Bwana (boss). [It’s truly brilliant: probably my favorite part of the book—contrasting the easy, flowing attitude of the hunter-gatherer/Leaver against the anxious, high-strung Alan/Taker.] The net effect is to disabuse Alan of the sense that life is miserable without planting and controlling food. The final point from the Taker perspective is that the gods only provide the bare minimum of what one needs. Wresting control from the gods allows us to get more than we need. And having accomplished this, the gods lose power over us. We can thumb our noses at them.
5. Ishmael asks: Okay, if you’re now living in your hands now rather than the hands of the gods, what’s the problem? Why aren’t things just great—as they are meant to be? Alan admits that we’re not quite there yet. Complete freedom from the power of the gods awaits, once we control everything.
6. Takers imagine that living in the hands of the gods is “a state of utter and unending anxiety over what tomorrow’s going to bring.” The revolution is meant to put us beyond the hands of the gods. The Takers are therefore “those who [believe they] know good and evil,” while Leavers are “those who live in the hands of the gods.”

TWELVE (231/249)

We’ve come a long way, and have just a bit more to lock in.

1. Alan haggles with Art Owens, the carnival owner, about buying Ishmael. A canny-seeming Art shows no genuine interest and seems to haggle as a pro-forma gesture.
2. Alan rouses Ishmael, receiving in return a look of loathing. But, Ishmael overcomes his foul mood and sees the sense in carrying on, asking “where did we leave off?”
3. Ishmael gets Alan to connect that humans became human by evolving—by living in the hands of the gods. Takers, whose story is that humans are the end of the evolutionary line have structured things so that it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy—by living in such a way as to bring an end to creation!
4. Alan is finally in a place to work out the premise to the Leaver story. It’s startlingly simple, making Alan laugh: humans belong to the world, as has every living being since the beginning. Only by belonging to the world and living in the hands of the gods did we get to be humans. [This process might even be called sacred.]
5. The Taker premise leads to disaster and the end of “creation.” According to the Leaver premise, “creation goes on forever”
6. Alan rolls out wishful speculation on a possible human destiny as trailblazers of consciousness, showing other species how to do it and not make the mistakes we recognized just in time to correct. People need something inspiring to aim for, rather than a list of things that make them bad.
7. Can civilization belong to the world, or is the hunter-gatherer lifestyle the only way? Ishmael suggests that civilization per se is not fundamentally incompatible, but that it is subject to the Law of Life, and will ultimately fail if out of reckoning. Mindset is important.
8. Rapid transformation of the Soviet bloc (unthinkable even five years prior) indicates that major, quick change is feasible.
9. We desperately need to stop wiping out Leavers, who more than any others can help show us ways to live in accordance with the Law of Life. Nothing says we must revert to Stone-Age lifestyles, but neither can we continue acting as if we own the world. Ishmael suggests that a species priding itself on being inventors should get busy inventing compatible ways to live.
10. Some prisoners live quite comfortably, concentrating power within their domain. It’s the same in the prison of modernity (mentioning Donald Trump, in fact). Many prisons have an industry to keep inmates occupied. What is modernity’s “prison industry?” Consuming the world.
11. Recognizing that inmate inequality is unjust, some expend great effort trying to redistribute equity (within the modernity prison). The real aim should be destroying the prison, not redistributing wealth and power within this abominable institution.
12. Ishmael announces “I’m finished with you” and issues a huge sneeze. Alan vows to be back tomorrow, eliciting a dark stare from Ishmael and a final grunt.

THIRTEEN (255/275)

The lessons are over.

1. Alan sets out to rescue Ishmael, scraping together all his meager savings. His car has trouble and goes to the shop. He has no real plan of what to do if he succeeds in rescuing Ishmael, or for that matter how to get an unwilling gorilla into his car.
2. The car is hopeless, so Alan rents a van. He finds the carnival lot empty, but spots a few of Ishmael’s belongings. He learns from the guy doing clean-up that Ishmael died of pneumonia [as did Daniel Quinn, ultimately], the disposition of the body unknown to him.
3. Alan returns home, and calls the butler, Partridge, to let him know that Ishmael has died.
4. Alan notices that the poster of Ishmael’s he retrieved has a reverse side. On the front it asks: With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla? On the reverse: With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?

Anything Confusing?

I intend this to be a “living” document (at least the Do the Math appearance) that I may modify to improve clarity, accuracy, or completeness. To this end, if you find anything confusing or missing, please use the comment section below to let me know. It may help to include your level of familiarity with the book (never read; read in 1998; read recently; have read multiple times) so that I might best contextualize the comment (all levels of familiarity are valuable in different ways). Refer to sections as 5.3, etc.

Acknowledgments

I thank Alex Leff for looking over this summary and offering valuable comments and suggestions.